Six Days In
by tiltedsyllogism
Summary: A week into their on-site army training, Mike and John talk about where they're headed, and why.


Mike collapsed onto his cot. His legs were sore, but it was his shoulders that burned like they might fall off. Day 6 of ITC was a full day of weapons training, and Mike's arms had not been ready. He and some of the other lads had a good laugh about it, over supper—nobody had stood up to it, really, other than a couple of blokes who looked as if they'd got their A-levels in sport. But now he was alone, the doubt was creeping back in. He closed his eyes.

He'd wondered along the way whether the Army was the right thing for him. Everyone else had wondered, too; he'd seen it in their faces clear enough. But he'd made it through selection with flying colours, hadn't he, and shown up as well as Watson in CIC. Everyone knew they needed more men in the field with medical training. It had seemed perfect, at first: a way for someone like him, who didn't have top marks or surgeon's hands, to make a difference. So he and John Watson had gone up together.

He liked John, who had only been another face in the lab until six months ago. And he liked having a friend along the way. They were doing this together, and on the bad days that helped Mike remember why he had signed up.

There had been some of those before they had got to camp: days when he was tired from a day of studying and had to drag himself to evening training all the same, days when he had spent an entire evening at the pub nursing a single beer because the men in his family ran to fat, and Mike didn't much fancy lugging a lot of extra weight around on the track or the obstacle course. But most days, they were good. He had never been a quitter, and being in the army, that felt like a thing to be proud of. At least, it had until recently. He was trying not to think about it.

"Rough day?"

John's voice. Mike opened his eyes.

"Oh. Yeah," he said. He clambered up onto one elbow, facing John's cot.

John kicked off his boots and stretched out, groaning. "Same here. Obstacle course for me, today, and I'm half-wrecked, I don't mind saying. You?"

Leaning on his shoulder had been a bad idea. Mike pulled up to sitting. "Weapons training."

John gave a dry chuckle. "Lucky chump."

"Just a chump. It's not quite a cakewalk for the rest of us."

John looked over at him in that way he had, face kind and stern without moving a muscle.

"Surgeon's hands, I guess."

Mike grinned. "That's what I mean about luck."

John folded up sitting, quick and lithe, and rolled his neck. "You'll get it eventually. You'll be hitting bullseyes in no time."

"Yeah." Mike swung his legs, watching his socked toes pass in and out of his line of sight. Mike didn't know about John's marks; they weren't mates like that. But he knew that John had a cool head and steady hands in the operating theater, because their classmates talked. The tutors didn't, but everyone knew the Dean had taken John into his office, after word got round that he had enlisted, and tried to change his mind. Mike wondered why John still chose the army, after something like that.

"All right?" John asked.

"Sorry, yeah, good." Mike swallowed. "Guess I'm… having trouble adjusting, is all."

John pursed his lips. "I'm sure you will. Just takes a bit of time."

Easy for him to say, Mike thought, with a small burst of resentment. Less than a week and he looked like he'd lived in the barracks a year. He'd never looked like that at Barts, Mike realized—he'd always been tense around the edges, like an animal on the verge of flight. He was different, here. Quiet, but calm. It was Mike who felt like his edges didn't line up with the world anymore.

John caught his eye. "You'll be fine, Stamford."

Mike nodded. "Yeah." And it was probably true. John understood this world better than he did. "It's just…. What's it all for, you know. In the end?"

John shrugged. "Keep the world safe." His voice took on a strange edge. "That's worth a bit of sacrifice, I reckon."

"Course it is, yeah, of course." Mike said, conciliatory. He plucked at the edge of his blanket and sneaked a glance up. John had locked his eyes onto his own boot, lying on the floor, like he was ready to hack it to pieces if it tried anything clever. Mike chose his words carefully.

"At Barts, we—we couldn't save everybody."

"Course not," said John.

"It's hard to accept," Mike went on. "But you have to. People die, and you can't stop it. They die." Mike felt his heart beating faster. Years of thinking, obsessively thinking, but this was the first time he'd talked about it out loud, to anybody. That wasn't how it should be, for doctors, for medical students, never to talk about people dying. One of the tutors at Barts had done, their first year, when it was all textbooks and slides. Mike had thought it a bit overwrought at the time, and had forgotten it; but it came back to him in third year, after the pretty girl who had come in with ordinary chest pains had died on the operating table and he had run himself ragged for the next three days going back, trying to fix it in his head, even though he had only been in the gallery observing. At the end of three sleepless nights, it had come back to him. Mike didn't even remember the tutor's name anymore, but he remembered his face, and his hard, sad voice, warning a roomful of bright-faced stupid kids that they'd drive themselves spare unless they could accept that some of their patients would die. Mike hadn't paid attention then. But two years later, on that sleepless night, he'd started, and he'd kept at it, since, as best he could. He'd tried. He took a deep breath. John was looking at him, now.

"You can't always save them," Mike said. "You're not always in control."

John nodded, a quick jerk of the head, like any more would be too much.

"And so this is good, this, this…" Mike trailed off, waving his hand to take it all in, the dorms, the training fields, the officers who shouted at them to pick their knees up as they ran splashing through the muddy grass.

John pursed his lips and nodded again. "S'good, not always being in control. In charge."

"Yeah, yeah," said Mike, agreeably. "Except we are in control, aren't we? Or we will be, soon."

"Because we'll be in combat," Mike clarified. "Shooting."

"On orders," rejoined John.

"Yeah, of course. But still. Shooting."

John had closed in again, staring at the wall.

"I mean," said Mike, "we're doctors. We try to save lives, and we can't, always. So you could say there are people who die because of us, fair enough. We've got to live with that. But killing, it's—" He nodded, like his body was agreeing with words his mouth hadn't been able to put together yet. "It's a bit different, isn't it?"

He'd found a loose thread in the blanket, he realized now, and unraveled the stitching along a good half-meter of the edge. He wound the loose thread around his finger, because he'd got it now, this worry he'd been shifting around in his mind for the past few days. "It's a bit thick, coming from a doctor, god complex and everything, but saving lives is different. Killing someone—that's more control than I want, I think. Do you know what I mean?"

John said nothing.


End file.
